Small Town Letdown
by Lance Ruhiru
Summary: Kyle's running away and Kenny's along for the ride. KennyKyle.


"We're running away," is how Kyle announces himself when he barges into Kenny's room, and Kenny is touched. That Kyle would run to _him_ when he wanted to run away, and that he'd just assumed Kenny would be included in the adventure.

Kyle has his—meaning, his father's—car parked outside, and he's fidgeting with poorly-suppressed excitement when they climb in. "We've got to blare some music," he says in a rush, drumming his fingers to a phantom beat. "To _commemorate the moment_. This is a music-blaring situation, isn't it?"

"All your dad has are show tunes," Kenny points out, pulling out the stack of CDs wedged into the cup holder.

"I don't care! _Blare_ it!"

They stop in Fairplay for gas. Someone has scrawled _Pit For Shit_ below the sign for the restroom; "Truth in advertising," Kyle says, wrinkling his nose when they swing the door open as an instinctive measure against the smell.

"You're going to pick up some sort of disease."

"Betcha I can do it without using my hands."

A roll of the eyes. "You can not."

"Oh yeah? Watch me."

"I'm not going to _watch_ you take a dump; sick, man!"

Kenny laughs and Kyle leaves the cesspool to roam the gas station aisles, searching for sustenance; he finds Stan's Hot Tamales, a testament to small town sensibilities and a prime example of why he needs to Get The Fuck Out Of South Park—Kyle can't take the Satanic panic, the heteronormativity, or the family values that censor candy packaging.

"You _done_ yet?" he calls, returning to the restroom in time to see Kenny, in a flourish of elbows movements, turn off the faucet and turn on the air-dry.

"There's a plethora of wisdom of these here stalls," Kenny says, grinning. "Like, 'Phil Collins is the shit (and I just took one)'."

"Oh, how enlightening," Kyle says sarcastically.

"All _riiiiight_," Kenny cheers when the air-dry shuts off. "High five me, man."

"No fucking way."

"C'mon, I _swear_ I didn't use my hands."

Kyle buys a 52 oz. party bag of M&M's, the kind with the resealable zipper on top, and he and Kenny takes turns dipping their hands into it, circular multicolored marks on their palms, while listening to the soundtrack of _Cats_ on high. 70 miles from South Park Kyle's cell phone starts to ring, and Kyle chucks it out onto the freeway without so much as glancing at the screen.

"I want to be completely dependent from my parents," Kyle tells Kenny. "I don't want anything to do with them anymore."

"How're you going to pay for all this?"

"Oh, I swiped Dad's credit cards before I left."

Kenny laughs so hard he snorts an M&M out of his nose, which is less than pleasant.

They stop for lunch at McDonald's, where Kenny picks the "i'm lovin' it™" sticker off their receipt and slaps it to his ass; they eat dinner at a gas station, sitting on the curb and sucking on popsicles until their lips go numb. Kyle doesn't want to drive all the way to a motel so they just pull into a rest stop, put the seats down, and climb into the back. Kenny has difficulty falling asleep, not so much for the pungent aroma of cow that seeps in everywhere, but for the soft sound of Kyle snoring and the other's hot breath on his neck.

The next morning they drive through a town that tried to keep all manner of sin out of city limits by utilizing a local ordinance: no liquor stores, adult boutiques, or gambling establishments can be built within two blocks of a church, so a church has been erected at every other street corner. The result is dozens of churches falling into decay; it's sad, Kenny says, and Kyle puts his foot down on the gas. There's something sinister about small towns, he says. Something undeniably creepy, like carnival music and the face paint on clowns.

They stop for Japanese cuisine at a restaurant that boosts about its fresh sushi. "Why ain't ya eating, man?" Kenny asks between stuffing his face, spraying Kyle with flakes of fish. Kyle makes a great show of wiping his face off.

"Dude, _fresh sushi_."

"Yeah, so?"

"We're right next door to a discount goldfish pet shop!"

And this is how it ends, the only way it could: 35 miles from the sushi restaurant the car breaks down; Kenny takes a look under the hood and slumps over, dead, whether from car exhaust, bad sushi, or coincidental unrelated heart attack, none can say; Kyle walks a mile to the closest call box and gets picked up by the local police force, whom he stays with, beating them at blackjack, until his mother arrives; he spends the next eight straight hours with her, getting the tongue-lashing of his life; and when they finally pull into their driveway it is with the understanding that Kyle has to work until he pays back everything he charged on his father's card, plus the expenses of the towing company and the gas money his mother spent coming to get him, and that he is grounded until he leaves for college.

Two days later, when Kenny comes back, he walks over to the Broflovski's and lets himself in. Kyle is up in his room with Stan and Cartman—the former is chastising him and telling him that the next time he feels like doing something crazy he should come to _him_ so that he can talk him out of it (which is precisely why Kyle didn't go to him) and the latter is saying he knew he'd pussy out and call his mommy to come get him. Kyle looks past them both at Kenny when he enters the room and grins, and again Kenny is infatuated once again—that Kyle would bestow special attention on him, when he would expend it being Stan's best friend and Cartman's enemy before. "Don't worry; it won't happen again," Kyle tells Stan and Cartman, "I only left because there wasn't a reason to stay," and Kenny grins back at him.


End file.
